The IT (Information Technology) systems owned and operated by various businesses and institutions can be highly complex. A typical IT system may entail multiple computers with numerous pieces of interconnected software on each computer. The deployment, configuration, and management of these IT systems is manually intensive and is accomplished through ad-hoc combinations of human experience, communal knowledge, a collection of unrelated software tools, and documents that are often incomplete, out of date, hard to locate when needed, or difficult to understand. The manually intense operation of IT systems is often the cause of malfunctions and sub-optimally performing systems. Changes to IT systems are also typically managed informally, for example through email messages. If an IT system has, for example, a 3-tier application and a fix or change needs to be applied, there is no convenient way to determine whether the fix or change is valid or whether it will break the IT system. Such changes may be preceded by extensive testing. As an IT system becomes more complex, the ad hoc approach breaks down; information is not fully shared or becomes stale, inefficiencies and mistakes increase, etc. In sum, modern complex IT systems are managed using techniques that have changed slowly and have not improved with the increases in complexity of IT systems. There is no way to standardize the configuration of IT systems. This lack of standardization and lack of improvement in IT system management continues to expose businesses, institutions, and other enterprises to substantial risks and costs.
Absent standardized configuration tools and models, there is no sure or easy way to check whether the operational policies and preferences of an IT system are being met. There is no flexibility; changes and extensions of the IT system are difficult to validate. There are no systems by which some predefined components can be “programmed” to model or capture operational policy. Many of the problems mentioned above could be alleviated if there were ways to capture and formalize the operational knowledge of an IT system, that is, the knowledge associated with the desired configuration environment and operation of an IT system.